Was P L Travers the real Mary Poppins?

Image 1 of 2

Image 1 of 2

Justine Picardie

12:01AM GMT 28 Oct 2008

It is now 75 years since P L Travers created 'Mary Poppins', but her tale of dark magic remains as enchanting as ever. What's more, writes Justine Picardie, it has a surprising relevance to our credit-crunched age

If the mark of a classic is its ability to remain relevant for each generation – to be reinvented, as if by magic, at the same time as seeming reassuringly unchanged – then Mary Poppins is a triumphantly successful creation; or, as she herself put it, 'practically perfect in every way'. This autumn, 75 years after P L Travers first wrote Mary Poppins into life, Sir Cameron Mackintosh's musical version is touring the country and playing on Broadway, while the original book is being reissued by HarperCollins. As Mackintosh observes in his introduction to the novel's latest edition, 'Mary Poppins is, and always will be, unique; stern, dependable, businesslike, magical and yet eternally loveable.'

But the original character, like her author, Pamela Travers, is far darker and more mysterious than Julie Andrews' sweetness and light in the Disney film; which might be one of many reasons for her continuing capacity to captivate us. Mary Poppins inhabits the everyday world of nurseries, scented with toast and Sunlight soap, yet she also takes us to scarier places; for magic has always had its shadowy side, and often arises out of great crisis or times of intense need (as recognised by J K Rowling, an admirer of P L Travers, who adopted both her enigmatic disguise in initialling her first names, and also her theme of flight; just as Travers had herself been inspired by J M Barrie's Peter Pan).

It may not be coincidental, then, that the latest revival of Mary Poppins comes at a time when we are facing the most serious economic slump since the Great Depression; for although the Disney film version shifted the story from the impoverished 1930s to the golden days of Edwardian England, it also featured a catastrophic run on the bank where Mr Banks was employed – an event directly reflecting the era in which Travers wrote and set her novel, during the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash. Thus, on the very first page of Mary Poppins, we learn that the Banks family lives in 'the smallest house' in Cherry Tree Lane, and it is 'rather dilapidated and needs a coat of paint'. Mr Banks – as is fitting in a story published when banks were as wobbly as they are now, and unemployment was soaring – must work very hard to keep his job: 'the City was a place where Mr Banks went every day – except Sundays, of course, and Bank Holidays – and while he was there he sat on a large chair in front of a large desk and made money. All day long he worked, cutting out pennies and shillings and half-crowns and threepenny-bits. And he brought them home with him in his little black bag. Sometimes he would give some to Jane and Michael for their money-boxes, and when he couldn't spare any he would say, "The Bank is broken"…'

As it happens, the run on the bank was a Disney invention – and a brilliant one – but Travers, who wept at the film's Hollywood première in 1964 (whether out of annoyance, disapproval or grief), knew what it meant to live in the shadow of a broken bank, and the sorrow of a broken bank manager. She was born in Queensland, Australia, in 1899, in the house attached to a branch of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, where her father worked. His name was Travers Robert Goff; his first daughter was born Helen Lyndon Goff (known to her family simply as Lyndon), but changed her name as a young actress and journalist to Pamela Lyndon Travers. After she became famous she rewrote her past, describing a childhood on a sugarcane plantation, and casting her father as a handsome Irishman. In truth, he was born in Deptford, south London, and as Travers' biographer, Valerie Lawson, reveals in Mary Poppins, She Wrote, there was no romantic plantation: 'her father was a bank manager before he was demoted to bank clerk. He died in his early forties, his life unfulfilled, his family left destitute.' He drank heavily, a habit that his employers disapproved of, and his already unstable position was made more precarious by the fact that the boom years of the old century were finished, and the threat of financial crisis loomed over the bank's employees, as well as its customers, many of whom were seeing their loans foreclosed. His wife, Margaret, had also lost most of her inheritance when the Queensland National Bank, where her uncle was a director, was found insolvent.

Related Articles

In January 1907 Travers Goff feared he was about to be demoted yet again; he became ill with a high fever, and died several days later. His daughter Lyndon was seven, the oldest of three little girls. Some time afterwards her mother, still grieving, ran out of the house during a thunderstorm, crying that she was going to drown herself in a nearby river. Lyndon wrapped a quilt around herself and her two younger sisters, and told them the story of a magical white horse that could fly even though it had no wings. Retelling this tale in adulthood, Travers identified it as the origin of her authorial identity; as Lawson observes, 'Lyndon believed the magic horse ran underground, and came up eventually as Mary Poppins.'

Her mother returned home that night, but Lyndon was to make her escape. After a brief stint as a secretary in a cashier's office – which she hated, dreading having to balance the books at the end of each day ('probably because of my early association with money, or rather the lack of it,' she later admitted) – she became an actress, adopting a new name and touring Australia with a repertory company. By 1924 she was also writing journalism and poetry, and sailed to England, hoping to earn a living in London. Hardworking and quick-witted, she found buyers for her articles and submitted poems to the Irish Statesman. Its editor, the poet George Russell, was to become a lasting influence: after she travelled to Dublin to meet him, he introduced her to Yeats, and to the study of spiritualism, theosophy and various other forms of mysticism, which fascinated Travers for the rest of her life.

Russell also introduced her to Madge Burnand, the daughter of one of his friends, and the two women formed a close friendship. There has been speculation that this may have been a lesbian relationship, along with a subsequent attachment to an American named Jessie Orage, but Pamela remained as tight-lipped on her affairs of the heart as Mary Poppins. At any rate, in 1931 Madge and Pamela moved out of their rented flat in London and set up home together in a thatched Sussex cottage; and it was there, in the winter of 1933, while recovering from pleurisy, that she began to write Mary Poppins.

The story – which was to continue over the course of eight books – revolves around a household in the Depression, whose inhabitants are also somewhat depressed. True, Mrs Banks is not suicidal, and Mr Banks is not an alcoholic, but the family nevertheless reveals some of the same strains as the author's own childhood. There are four children – Jane, the eldest, then Michael, the twins and a baby on the way – and although there are servants ('Mrs Brill to cook for them, and Ellen to lay the tables'), chaos is always close at hand. 'Mr Banks… said to Mrs Banks that she could either have a nice, clean, comfortable house or four children. But not both, for he couldn't afford it.'

When Mary Poppins arrives, she is 'a shape… in the gathering darkness', picked up by the wind and blown to the front door: 'the watching children heard a terrific bang, and as she landed the whole house shook.' Once inside, she immediately reveals her magical powers – sliding up the banisters towards the nursery and pulling a vast number of accoutrements out of an apparently empty carpet bag – yet this Mary Poppins is far more troubling than Julie Andrews in the Disney film. She is vain and imperious, takes offence at the mildest questioning, doses the children with a mysterious potion and leads them into danger as often as she rescues them. But her authority is absolute: 'you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her. There was something strange and extraordinary about her – something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.'

Nowadays any nanny who behaved in a similar fashion would be regarded with the utmost suspicion, yet such is the magic of Mary Poppins that she has become a byword for excellence in childcare. This message is reinforced in Cameron Mackintosh's musical version – as in the earlier Disney film – when she performs a miraculous healing of a troubled family. Disney had turned Mrs Banks into a suffragette – much to Travers' annoyance – and Mackintosh has Mr Banks being fired by the bank after a risky investment decision; in both versions Mary Poppins makes the parents realise what truly matters – their children, above all else – and domestic harmony is restored, so that the nanny can depart, leaving mother safely at home with the family and father reinstated at work.

But Travers' own writing was far more subversive than that, as you might expect from a resolutely single parent, who adopted a baby boy in 1939, and showed rather fewer childcare skills than her fictional heroine: she was appalled when her new son cried at night, and talked of sending him to a babies' home in Tunbridge Wells. Their relationship improved thereafter, but, even so, he was dispatched to boarding school while Travers continued to concentrate on her career; by the time he was 20, he had a drinking problem and spent six months in prison for driving drunk without a licence.

'If you are looking for autobiographical facts,' Travers once wrote, 'Mary Poppins is the story of my life.' Given her tendency to re-imagine her past, and her refusal to submit to direct questioning by interviewers, this identification with Mary Poppins seems entirely appropriate – an elusive figure who comes out of the sky, and flies away when the wind changes. Like Peter Pan, she has a sinister side (it is, incidentally, often overlooked that Travers' publisher was Peter Davies, J M Barrie's adopted son, and the inspiration for Peter Pan); and her magic allows children to take flight, but also lands them in perilous places. According to Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath spoke often of Mary Poppins, seeing her as 'the fairy godmother of her childhood'; but there is also something of the bad fairy about her – just a touch, yet enough to keep us spellbound.

And what, I wonder, would Mary Poppins make of her continuing hold over generations of children? She would take it as her due, of course, while remaining secretive as always, for as Pamela Travers made clear in her first story, 'nobody ever knew what Mary Poppins felt about it, for Mary Poppins never told anybody anything…'